ACLU, EFF, & Others Fight RIAA for Debbie Foster 298
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In a landmark legal document, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen, the ACLU of Oklahoma Foundation, and the American Association of Law Libraries have submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of the motion for attorneys fees that has been made by Deborah Foster in Capitol Records v. Debbie Foster, in federal court in Oklahoma. This brief is mandatory reading for every person who is interested in the RIAA litigation campaign against consumers."
Of Course (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of Course (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think a court would call the lawsuits harassment. The real problem here is that even those who are innocent pay up rather than defend themselves due to the cost and risk of doing the latter. In a fair legal system, an innocent man should not feel the need to pay a fee for something he didn't do.
Re:ACLU and attorney's fees (Score:5, Insightful)
It may seem shady business to you, but that is the way the rules are written for cases involving . . .
(C)ivil (L)iberties.
And the ACLU did not make those rules, the state did. And I'm glad they made them that way.
KFG
Oh, RIAA, what won't you do... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like a rape victim taking the rapist to court and proving to be so vile and vicious as to turn the public in favor of the rapist (real mass pirates, not individuals, in terms of metaphor), and get pro bono law groups to back up the sonofabitch too! Astounding, I say. Well, that's what happens when you screw over everyone you come into contact with and try to crucify the innocent instead of behaving civilly about the matter and going after real pirating rings. Silly suits, instant gratification in greed and money will mean your doom... particularly when you have nothing to do with music itself, aside from litigating and controlling it for profit.
I tell you what, if I were in charge of any company with a product line that could be easily pirated, I'd be suing the RIAA for making piracy more publicly acceptable through their corporate grotesqueries of lawsuits and such. I'm sure you could find a lawyer with a sharp enough tongue and wit to word it quite well.
Re:Oh, RIAA, what won't you do... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Of Course (Score:5, Insightful)
To someone who regularly deals with things legal - such as a lawyer or judge - a single lawsuit which is without merit is little more than a minor annoyance.
To a single parent whose biggest "crime" to date has been to allow their child to use the Internet without understanding what their child was doing, being threatened with fines of $thousands is scary, and if it's done purely to generate publicity with little or no concern as to whether or not the parent is actually guilty, I'd say it is harrassment.
And I bet you anything you like every single lawyer on the RIAA's payroll is well aware that facing a court of law is a terrifying idea for a layperson.
Re:Of Course (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is how it starts.
KFG
A lot like the McLibel case (Score:5, Insightful)
What proceeded was the longest ever court case in British legal history and in the end the court agreed that indeed, McDonalds do, quote: "exploit children with their advertising, falsely advertise their food as nutritious, risk the health of their long-term regular customers, are "culpably responsible" for cruelty to animals reared for their products, are "strongly antipathetic" to unions and pay their workers low wages."
From http://www.mcspotlight.org/case/trial/verdict/ind
So not only can uninformed consumers not make a good choice, but when people try to inform consumers of FACTS, money-laden corporations can shut them up most of the time. So on the whole, markets don't work properly in these cases because no consumer can be adequately informed about absolutely every product that some corrupt corporation is selling.
Likewise with the RIAA Mafia, most people cannot afford to defend against them or have the money to inform the public of the other side of the story - i.e. how the damage that RIAA claims P2P causes is largely exagerrated.
It's only the free market fundamentalists that think markets are sacrosanct, and "informed" consumers can defeat corrupt organisations through consumer power, despite the wealth and power of some of the players involved. Unfortunately, there appears to be rather a lot of those in America. No wonder the Middle East thinks America's corrupt.
Re:Of Course (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why didn't this happen before? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bingo! We need to form the MCAA - Media Consumer's Association of America, get Congress to insist on a levy on blank tapes and CDs and DVDs etc in order to to allow the members to participate in [rampant piracy] exercising their rights and be indemnified for all their legal costs!
Re:Of Course - NOT (Score:4, Insightful)
a) Cities are GOVERNMENTS that are quite capable of
dealing with the "burden" of a lawsuit.
b) An American GOVERNMENT has 0.0 business showing
any sort of public favoritism to any particular
religion, PERIOD.
Sensible Xian fundies are actually the FIRST people
to object to the sort of shenanigan you are defending.
Re:Corporate Bullying-Slashdot Lawyering. (Score:4, Insightful)
The social cost of suing or prosecuting individuals for non-commercial copyright infringement of music far outweighs the social value of having copyrights on music to begin with.
Metallica is not worth the ruination of lives involved, or the interference with other industries (namely mine) that the RIAA dreams of implementing.
And they continue to wonder... (Score:1, Insightful)
I used to listen to music all the time, a diehard avid fan. Then, in say 2000, 2001 when music content started taking a nose dive into the trash and the possibility of getting arrested for listening to music that I copied from my own collection of CDs, I gave up music. Do you think I want to spend $200 a month or more to eventually get aressted for it?
If you could get arrested for watching TV, would you continue to watch TV? With Tivo that may be possible one day and then I will give up TV also.
Who are these RIAA, MPAA rocket scientists b@st@5ds, that can't understand that?
Nathan
I smell class action (Score:3, Insightful)
From the motion:
And inevitably, that would be the fatsest way to deal the **AA a blow -- if everyone sued wrongfuly joind together in a class action civil suit and sued them for an outrageous amount of money. They wouldn't get the outrageous amount of money, but the trouble with this whole process has been that there's really no mainstream publicity of the matter. A class action suit might change that. Of course if you really wanted to stick it to the **AA, sic NY Atty General Spitzer on them.
Re:Alternate Brief Summary... (Score:5, Insightful)
Who's paying these legal fees? Right, the members of the RIAA. When they have to pay defendants' legal fees more often, they will find it is no longer close to profitable to chase individuals.
At that point, these frivolous lawsuits disappear.
Now, the problem is that no court has ruled that the primary lawsuits they've been using as threats for people to settle are frivolous. This is based upon the second lawsuit involving the defendant. What is needed is a watershed case where a judge legally tosses the RIAA out of court for its frivolous suit, and for that case to hold up on appeal. Then there is precedent, and the RIAA will have to screw itself, because even they can;t afford to pay legal fees for thousands of defendants they are wrongfully suing.
Re:two points (Score:4, Insightful)
The downside to your proposal, You do minor damage to my car,, say $200.00, I have an attorney on retainer, for my business, so I have my attoryne spend 200 hours procecuting the case ath $300/hr, so you owe me after I emerge victorious, $60,200. and I just saved myself two monts retainer, And no I won't use small claims because I cannot use my attorney there, and the whole point of the law suit is to exceed my retainer. (the actual damages are just incidental.
Many people suspect that your proposal would lead to litigation that is aimed at reducing legal costs,
Re:ACLU and attorney's fees (Score:4, Insightful)
I really don't understand your first paragraph at all. The ACLU is an organization with a long history of fighting for civil liberties. Why would you slam them because once in a blue moon they actually get paid a small portion of the expenses involved in their work, instead of the money having to come from their contributors? And why is it wrong for someone who is proved to have violated someone else's civil rights to have to pay all or part of their attorneys fees in vindicating their rights? And why is it wrong for our laws to occasionally shift the attorneys fees to the guilty party, in order to give legal aid lawyers, litigants, and others an incentive to take on a cause where the other side has much more money? Attorneys fees statutes are equalizers between big and small, which is what our country -- and our courts -- are supposed to be about. Contingent fees, and fee-shifting statutes, are the one small exception, one small dent in the rule which otherwised prevails more often than not in the U.S.: whoever has the most money has the best chance of winning in court. I.e., they are a step up from the law of the jungle, that might makes right. Would you have us step down? If not, you shouldn't slam them for fighting the good fight and once in a while getting a little bit of their fees paid back.
Re:Brief Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
If you pay the lawyers $250k/yr on salary you can have 72 of them full time.
18,000 lawsuits / 72 lawyers is only 250 each over three years is about 83 per year, or (with a 240-day work-year) is a little more than one every three days.
Ok, but there's other people involved, and I'm sure that since they work in bulk I'm going to estimate that the last three years looks something like:
Half a dozen 'techies' at $80k = $1,440,000
Hot line (no idea, just guessing) = $3,000,000
Legal Team (half dozen, plus assistants) = $5,400,000
Grand Total: $9,840,000
Profit: $8,160,000
But that's just a guess...
Re:Of Course - NOT (Score:1, Insightful)
If the majority of people in a city want a nativity scene they should get a nativity scene. It's no more an egregious expenditure of public funds than a dog park (ie. a place where people can take their dogs and play with them off leash.) Or a skate park. Or flying flags on the fourth of July.
Atheism is a religious view. Allowing the lunatic fringe to demand that public life be entirely devoid of any reference to god or religion is just as much a violation of people's 1st amendment rights as requiring prayer in schools.
Re:two points (Score:3, Insightful)
That is what Fair Use is for (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is Mafia even legal? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think these organizations should be illegal, just reigned in a little bit (OK, a lot). The RIAA was actually started for a good reason -- to create standards for phonograph records. The "RIAA curve" was developed by engineers from different record companies so that 33 1/3 and 45 rpm records would have the best sound possible. All record companies created their albums according to this standard, thus ensuring any album from any label would have a consistent technical sound quality (of course, the quality of the artist is not assured).
Hilary Rosen was actually a popular figure around college campuses before the whole mp3 thing started. Back in the early to mid 90's, there was a move in Washington to censor what was being recorded. Hilary and the RIAA fought this and "took the fight to the people." The end result was the warning labels that are found on some cds.
That said, both the RIAA and the MPAA are way out of line when it comes to copyright, and have been for years. Jack Valenti compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler (the VCR ended up creating one of the most lucrative markets that the movie industry ever had) and the RIAA has fought digital music tooth and nail. These lawsuits are the worst -- instead of actually addressing the problem, they have hurt innocent people and have turned their customers into the enemy.
I have no problem with organizations that exist to make things better for both their industry and their customers, but when said organization attempts to abuse either or both in an attempt to prevent the market from evolving, then it is time to penalize (or disband) said organization. Perhaps trade organizations in Washington should be treated like Fraternities at University -- obey the rules and all is well, get out of line, face sanctions or even closure. The way the RIAA is pursuing these lawsuits definitely should warrant a review.
Mod Parent Up for Insight (Score:5, Insightful)
Additional considerations:
- 18,000 is just the number of lawsuits filed. How many "settled" by paying some kind of greenmail before a lawsuit was filed?
- From TFA, the range of settlements was $3,000 to $11,000. The average is probably closer to the low end, but might be a few thousand dollars more, which would bump the revenue by 30% ++
- Most likely, there are several attorneys on staff but also law firms in every state that do the actual filings, appearances, etc.
- In-house attorneys probably don't make $250K even fully loaded (benefits, overhead, etc.), but this is offset by the previous point.
It may be just a guess, but who thinks RIAA didn't do a cost-benefit analysis of their strategy before they started down this road? Of course, part of that analysis would have been the revenue they think they're losing (including future revenue) by not contesting file sharing. No idea on that numberRe:RIAA Profits (Score:2, Insightful)
Copyrights (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Terrifying (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Terrifying (Score:5, Insightful)
Where a lawyer can be genuinely helpful is, surprise surprise, in understanding the law: precendents, statutes and the like. The question is not simply "what are the facts?", it is "what does the law have to say about the facts we've established?"